Monday, October 1, 2012

Setting OCaml/F# Environment in Emacs

For those who don’t know, I did the first 50 Project Euler problem about three years ago (to teach myself F#) and uploaded them at fsharp-euler wikispace. Since then, however, I haven’t had time to do any update.
By update, I mean writing up more explanations on the existing programs, rather than more programs for new Euler problems. Because for learning the basic syntax and core library of a functional language, solving the first 50 should be enough. Solving more problems adds little to the conquering of the language itself, though would be a great mental exercise.
During this weekend, I had the time to play with OCaml on Project Euler problems, and to set up OCaml in Windows. The following shows the Emacs screenshot.
I use Emacs with Tuareg mode and Auto-Complete mode, and I also find Tuareg’s library browser (Menu –> Tuareg –> OCaml library … ) useful. Auto-Complete mode is also automatically hooked with Tuareg mode to provide key word completion.

The completion dictionary is limited to OCaml keywords only. I used this little trick by scanning the whole library fold and get all function names using F#….

By appending the output to the tuareg dict file (on my machine, it is ~\.emacs.d\elpa\auto-complete-20120922.1815\dict\tuareg-mode), we now get the nice Intellisense for OCaml libraries:

We can apply this trick to other OCaml libraries, and automate the updating of the dictionary file. Poor man’s intellisense, haha! Don’t worry about the length of the word list, the PHP list is over 100KB, and auto complete mode handles just fine!

There are other things to enhance, e.g. when we move cursor up and down along the completion choices, the corresponding function signature would be displayed at the mini buffer. But I am not familiar with elisp, so I opened the library reference buffer on the right window to check the signatures occasionally. For most of them, F# and OCaml have the same usage patterns, e.g. the main object is usually the last parameter of a function, and seeing the function name alone gives me sense of how to use it.

In Windows, we have the great Visual Studio IDE, but if you use F# in Linux, using F#-mode and auto complete mode will be handy.